{"id":1300,"date":"2009-10-26T19:36:43","date_gmt":"2009-10-26T19:36:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=1300"},"modified":"2009-10-26T19:36:43","modified_gmt":"2009-10-26T19:36:43","slug":"the_north_atlantic_treaty_orga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=1300","title":{"rendered":"The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) And Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday the blog at the Weekly Standard<\/a> posted an article on NATO’s reaction to the delay in President Obama’s committing more troops to Afghanistan.  This is an interesting situation.  President Bush tried very hard to obtain larger troop commitments from our NATO allies and was often unsuccessful.  In many cases when the troops were granted, they were restricted as to what their activities could be.  Now, as President Obama is still deciding what to do, in Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel is considering increasing the number of German troops and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has stated that he will be sending 500 more troops to Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

This reminds me of a debutante playing hard to get.  I don’t think that President Obama necessarily planned it this way, but the results are interesting.  Because America is quietly stepping away from her role as the world’s protector of freedom and democracy, the rest of the world is getting nervous.  The question is, “If America leaves a vacuum as it steps down from the role of world policeman, who will fill that role?”  I realize that some Americans will welcome the pulling back of America from its role, but we need to consider who will take our place and what they will stand for.  The logical successor to America as the leader of the world is China–it has the largest population and the strongest economy.  When you consider the civil rights record of China, I can understand why our NATO allies are getting nervous.<\/p>\n

To me, the question is whether or not America has a responsibility to work toward freedom for everyone.  What form should that work take?  We have been free and prosperous for a long time.  Even in the current economic times, poor Americans have a standard of living that is the envy of many people in other countries.  What responsibility do we have to share our freedom and prosperity?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday the blog at the Weekly Standard posted an article on NATO’s reaction to the delay in President Obama’s committing more troops to Afghanistan.  This is an interesting situation.  President Bush tried very hard to obtain larger troop commitments from our … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}